Re:Clojure: Genetic Mona Lisa problem in 250 beautiful lines
by michaelneale on Tuesday January 27, 2009 @07:12AM
(#452003)
if all the classes in the classloader are no longer referenced, and there are no references to the classloader itself, then they will all be GCed (but often there is a ref to the classloader that causes the PermGen issue).
In response to this problem, Clojure now uses an ephemeral classloader. I don't know the JVM that well, but Rich Hickey says this means the anonymous classes generated by evaling fn forms can be collected.